Advertisers have a desire to increase exposure of their goods or services. On the Internet, advertisers seek publishers to spread the word about the advertiser's goods or services. Commonly, publishers generate exposure for an advertiser's web site or promotional content by placing ads on web pages, purchasing search results advertising for specific key words, sending email advertisements, or through other methods of creating exposure to the advertiser's goods and services. The various types of advertisements also include uniform resource locators (URLs) comprising a network address where published content about goods or services can be obtained.
Publishers work with one or more other members of a distribution channel to spread the word about an advertiser's promotional content. Other distribution members include firms that have customers for whom such advertising is appropriate (e.g., a list of email addresses), brokers which connect advertisers with publishers, and other parties that aid in distributing advertisements. Each party often requires some form of accounting to indicate if their services were used when a consumer makes a request for published content. Accounting is generally achieved through the common practice of client redirection. Although existing publication models achieve their goal of distributing advertisements, these models have various weaknesses.
One issue with known publication models is that advertisers can be penalized for the undesirable business practices of their publishers and other distribution channel members. Publishers are responsible for exposing an advertiser's promotional content to consumers, and generally advertisers have no control of or visibility to the methods employed by its publishers. For example, if a publisher distributes email advertisements to a list of individuals who have no interest in the advertiser's goods or services, these individuals might report such emails as spam. In severe cases, these reports can lead to the black listing of an advertiser's web site. This has catastrophic consequences for an advertiser as well as every other publisher promoting that advertiser's content, as black listing prevents consumers from reaching the advertised content. Complicating matters further, advertisers are typically unable to identify the publisher responsible for such black listing, making publisher accountability difficult or impossible.
Other known issues with existing publication models include delays in content delivery experienced by consumers and caused by client redirection. Excessive perceived delays can result in a consumer losing interest in the promotion even before obtaining content.
Ideally content providers, including advertisers, should be able to publish content while being insulated from black listing events or other negative reputation due to circumstances outside their control. Furthermore, published content should be provided to a client without requiring the client to be redirected.
Others have suggested using an intermediary content provider that can relay information from a primary provider to a remote user for various purposes. Examples include U.S. Pat. No. 6,953,783 to Bodwell et al., U.S. Pat. No. 7,103,645 to Leighton et al., and U.S. patent publication 2003/0120543 to Carey. Unfortunately, the approaches described in these and other references fail to fully protect a publisher from a black listing event. These and all other extrinsic materials discussed herein are incorporated by reference in their entirety. Where a definition or use of a term in an incorporated reference is inconsistent or contrary to the definition of that term provided herein, the definition of that term provided herein applies and the definition of that term in the reference does not apply.
What has yet to be appreciated is published content can be provided through an intermediary provider that appears as an originating source of the content while also reducing requirements for client redirection. Publishers provide access to content via a network address associated with the intermediary provider. Consumers or other clients can request the content directly from the intermediary provider. The intermediary provider can aggregate content from a primary provider, an advertiser for example, by obtaining the content at the primary provider's network address. The intermediary provider can then present the published content to the client. Should a black listing event occur, only the intermediary provider would be black listed as opposed to the primary provider. Furthermore, all redirections can be accomplished behind the intermediary provider.
Thus, there is still a need for methods of providing published content to a client.